Faction, and the Fire Not to Be Quenched

To the People of the United States:

This is the first of twelve papers. They borrow a form the founders used. In 1787 and 1788 the essays we now call The Federalist argued, one newspaper at a time, for a better government, and their opponents answered in print. These papers take up twelve places where our government binds today: faction, the debt, war, emergencies, money in elections, surveillance, the purse, impeachment, speech, trust in elections, the surrender of Congress’s power, and the duty of the citizen. Each follows the same seven steps: the pain point we live with now, what the founders warned, how the warning came true, the choke point where the machinery binds, the fix and the prevention, the strongest objection and my answer, and questions for the Candlelight. Every quotation of the founders, the Constitution and the courts is checked word for word against the record, and the modern record is held to one standard for both parties.

The series builds on my New Declaration of Independence, which I wrote in December 2025. In it I declared that “we reclaim our role as self-governing adults: we will read the founding documents for ourselves, understand the Bill of Rights, study the economic and political systems that shape our lives, and teach these truths to our children and communities.” ✓ verified, D4 These papers are my attempt to keep that promise in public. They also draw on what I have written before: one-America, Beneath the Platform, my papers on Civic Realism and the Tolerance Continuum, and my forthcoming No-America.

Why Candlelight. Each paper ends with questions for the Candlelight, so I should say what I mean by the word before I use it. In the years before 1776, speaking against the Crown was dangerous. Words against the king’s government could be prosecuted as seditious libel, and open defiance could be called treason. Blackstone, whose Commentaries the colonists studied, wrote that “Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public” ✓ verified, Q30, but that “if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.” ✓ verified, Q30 What counted as improper was for the king’s courts to decide. In 1735 a New York printer, John Peter Zenger, was tried for seditious libel for printing attacks on the royal governor. His lawyer warned the jury that men in power who provoke the people to complain would also try to “make that very complaint the foundation for new oppressions and prosecutions.” ✓ verified, Q31 The jury acquitted him. ¹²

So colonists gathered where they could, in homes and taverns, often by candlelight, to talk about their rights, read pamphlets aloud, and organize. Out of those conversations came the Committees of Correspondence. In November 1772 the Boston town meeting, on Samuel Adams’s motion, appointed a committee “to state the Rights of the Colonists and of this Province in particular, as Men, as Christians, and as Subjects” ✓ verified, Q32, and asked each town for “a free communication of their Sentiments on this Subject” ✓ verified, Q32. The committees spread from town to town and then from colony to colony, Common Sense passed from hand to hand, and at last came a declaration.

The Candlelight discussions recreate that tradition: citizens sitting together to talk about individual rights, liberty and self-government. What could once get you arrested is now our right, and our duty to use. The guide to hosting one is on the Candlelight page.

1. The pain point today

In 1958, nearly three Americans in four (73 percent) told Pew they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” brief In September 2025, 17 percent did. ¹ Gallup found confidence in Congress at 7 percent in 2022, a record low. In June 2026 average confidence across fourteen major institutions was 27 percent, with twelve of the fourteen at or near their lowest points. ²

Distrust of institutions has a twin: contempt for neighbors. In 1994, fewer than one in four members of either party held a very unfavorable view of the other party. By 2022, 62 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats did. ³

The most telling number is not a level. It is a swing. In 2024, 35 percent of Democrats and 11 percent of Republicans trusted the federal government. By September 2025, after the White House changed hands, the figures had flipped: 26 percent of Republicans, 9 percent of Democrats. Pew reports that since the 1970s trust has run higher among whichever party holds the White House. ¹ In July 2025 the gap between the parties in approval of the Supreme Court reached a record 64 points. ⁴

The institutions did not change overnight. The jersey on the people running them did. Trust that moves with the jersey is not trust in an institution. It is loyalty to a team, measured with a survey.

And the heat is rising. The U.S. Capitol Police opened 5,206 threat assessment cases in 2018. In 2025 they opened 14,938, nearly three times as many. ⁵

2. What they warned

None of this would have surprised the founders. They argued about nearly everything, but they agreed that faction is the disease popular government is most prone to.

Madison defined the danger in The Federalist No. 10. A faction, he wrote, is “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest” ✓ verified, Q08, turned against the rights of others or the good of the whole. He did not pretend it could be abolished. “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man” ✓ verified, Q09. Then a sentence that reads like a comment section: “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.” ✓ verified, Q10 Nor would good leaders rescue us: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” ✓ verified, Q11

Hamilton, opening The Federalist, asked first for humility: “we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society” ✓ verified, Q21.

John Adams, in a letter of 1780, named the exact shape we now live in: “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” ✓ verified, Q18

Hume, whom the founders read closely, was harsher: “Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other.” ✓ verified, Q17

Jefferson, in 1789, refused to hand his judgment to any party: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” ✓ verified, Q19 At his first inauguration in 1801 he reminded a bitterly divided nation that “every difference of opinion, is not a difference of principle” ✓ verified, Q20.

Then Washington, leaving office in September 1796, resolved to “warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally” ✓ verified, Q01. The effects: “It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” ✓ verified, Q04 The cycle: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” ✓ verified, Q02 The end of it: “The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual” ✓ verified, Q03. In an elected government, party is “a spirit not to be encouraged” ✓ verified, Q29. It is “A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame” ✓ verified, Q05.

3. How it came true

Washington’s key word was alternate. Domination, then revenge, then domination by the other side. The record of the last twenty years follows his outline, and it is written in both parties’ hands.

The Senate’s rules. In 2013 the Senate majority of one party changed the chamber’s precedent so that most nominations needed only a simple majority to end debate. In 2016 the majority of the other party left a Supreme Court nomination without a hearing or a vote for 293 days. In 2017 that majority extended the 2013 precedent to the Supreme Court. In 2022 the majority leader of the first party tried to limit debate on a voting bill by the same route and lost, 52 to 48. In 2025 the second party’s majority overturned the chair’s rulings again so that nominations could be confirmed in batches, 48 of them in a single vote. ⁶ Each step was defended as a reply to the last.

Impeachment. The House impeached the sitting President in 2019 and again in January 2021. The Senate acquitted both times; the most votes to convict were 57, where 67 were required. In 2024 a House led by the other party impeached a cabinet secretary, 214 to 213, and the Senate set the articles aside without a trial. Between June 2025 and September 2026 the House tabled three resolutions to impeach the sitting President. ⁷ A power the Constitution reserves for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” ✓ verified, Q27 has become a regular move in the contest.

Counting the votes. In 2005 a Representative and a Senator of one party objected to a state’s electoral votes; the Senate rejected the objection 1 to 74. In 2017 House members of that same party tried again, but no Senator joined them. In 2021 members of the other party objected to two states’ votes, and the joint session was broken off when a crowd breached the Capitol. More than 140 police officers were assaulted. About 1,583 people were charged. In January 2025 the sitting President pardoned those convicted, commuted fourteen sentences, and directed that pending cases be dismissed. ⁸

Here the standard has to hold its nerve. The rule is the same for both sides; the facts are not. A written objection that fails 1 to 74 and a breach of the Capitol during the count are different acts, and an honest ledger reports each at its true size. Symmetry means one scale for every column, not equal weight in every column.

The money, the referee and the purse. Super PAC spending grew from about $64.9 million in the 2010 cycle to $2.7 billion in 2023-2024, and since May 2025 the Federal Election Commission has lacked a quorum to act. ⁹ Appropriations have lapsed under presidents of both parties, most recently in 2025, the longest shutdown on record, and again in 2026. ¹⁰ Washington’s list reads like the minutes. I take up the debt in No. 2, the purse in No. 7 and impeachment in No. 8.

4. The choke point

Why does this keep happening when most citizens say they hate it? Because the friction is built into the machinery, and the first part to fail is the standard itself.

The guardrails were designed for branches, not teams. Madison’s remedy rested on two principles. “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause” ✓ verified, Q13. And “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” ✓ verified, Q14 The design assumed each branch would defend its own powers. When officeholders see themselves first as players on a team, ambition cooperates with the team in the other branch and opposes the other team wherever it sits. Every majority becomes a judge in its own cause.

The standard travels with the jersey. In my forthcoming No-America I name this failure: “Symmetry collapse is what happens when the standard begins to travel with the jersey.” ✓ verified, S1 The trust numbers in Part 1 are that sentence in data. Accountability does not vanish all at once. It narrows to the other side, and as I wrote there, “selective accountability is a slower spelling of no accountability.” ✓ verified, S2 My working test, the Twelve-Word Standard, is exactly that long: “if it would be wrong for them, it is wrong for us.” ✓ verified, S3 I will hold every paper in this series to it.

The standard fails first. My Dynamic Cycle-of-Destruction Equation (DQE) tracks a republic’s slide with a variable for symmetric standards, sigma. Across the cases I calibrated it against, I found that “The failure of symmetric standards precedes the fall of the zone reading, with measurable lag. The standards die before the behavior does, which makes sigma the leading indicator of everything this book fears.” ✓ verified, S4 My testing treats sigma as the gauge that moves first, not the only cause. That is why it matters: by the time the threat numbers rise, the standards are already gone.

Repair is slower than ruin. “Destruction is easier than repair,” I wrote, and “A lie travels lighter than its correction.” ✓ verified, S5 Every escalation in Part 3 took one vote. Undoing any of them takes a majority willing to bind itself.

The hinge is apathy, not hate. My Tolerance Continuum runs through six zones, from hate at the bottom to acceptance at the top, with apathy at the hinge: “Destructive minorities become dangerous when constructive majorities become inert.” ✓ verified, S6 My New Declaration of Independence names how a free people gets there: “We did not arrive here by a single election, a single party, or a single villain, but by a long, quiet slide of tolerance: tolerating what we knew was wrong, excusing what we knew was dangerous, and trading what is right for what is easy, loud, or comfortable.” ✓ verified, D1

5. The fix and the prevention

Madison held that “the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS” ✓ verified, Q12. The fix is not to abolish parties or silence anyone. It is to make the faction’s tools worth less and the citizen’s standard worth more.

For institutions:

1. No majority writes rules for its own immediate benefit. The founders showed the method. The Twenty-seventh Amendment holds that “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” ✓ verified, Q28 Apply the same delay to the rules of the game: changes to Senate debate and nomination precedents or to election law take effect only after the next general election. A majority that cannot know who will hold power then has to write a rule fair to both.
2. Make the House large enough to answer to its voters, and take the map away from the players. The House has been held at 435 by statute since 1929, not by the Constitution. Growing it, independent redistricting, ranked-choice general elections and open ballot access all lower the reward for playing to a base. (Not open primaries, which reach inside the parties instead of opening the election; see The Way Out.) ¹¹
3. Restore the referees. A campaign-finance commission that cannot reach a quorum is not a referee. Fill it, and set a deadline for Senate action on such vacancies.
4. Bank the fixes both sides can accept. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 raised the threshold for an objection to one-fifth of each chamber and made the presiding officer’s role ministerial. ⁸ Repairs are possible while the next crisis is unknown to both sides.

None of these remedies polices speech. As the Supreme Court put it in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943): “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion” ✓ verified, Q24. The cure for faction is structure and character, never orthodoxy.

For citizens:

1. Run the jersey swap before you share, vote or forgive. If you would not accept it from them, do not accept it from yours.
2. Clean your own house first. The Declaration’s pledge is “To examine our own hearts before accusing others; to clean our own house before demanding that others clean theirs.” ✓ verified, D2
3. Refuse the trust swing. Decide what makes an institution trustworthy before you know who runs it.
4. Do not be the inert majority. Attend one local meeting a quarter, read one serious source from the other side each week, and treat opponents, in the Declaration’s words, “as human beings before political opponents” ✓ verified, D3.
5. Host or join a Candlelight with people who do not vote the way you do. The guide is on the Candlelight page.

6. The strongest objection, and the answer

The objection. Parties are not the disease; they are how a large republic works. Madison and Jefferson built one within a few years of the warnings above. Parties organize choices and give voters a brand they can punish. And Americans disagree about real things; a call for “civility” can become a way to tell the side with the grievance to be quiet.

The answer. All fair, and none of it answers the evidence. This paper asks no one to abolish a party or soften a conviction; Madison and Washington asked only that the fire be watched. Disagreement on principle is the life of a republic. The trust swing in Part 1 is not. When one party’s trust in the same government falls from 35 percent to 9 in a year, and the other’s rises from 11 to 26, because one office changed hands, that is loyalty, not judgment. As for grievance, the Tolerance Continuum takes no side on who is right. As I put it in No-America, “It does not tell us who is correct in a given dispute. It tells us the quality of the relationship within which the dispute is taking place, and that quality determines whether the dispute can be resolved at all.” ✓ verified, S7 A real grievance needs a republic that can still resolve disputes, and faction spends that capacity first.

The Preamble says the people ordained the Constitution “in Order to form a more perfect Union” ✓ verified, Q23. More perfect is a direction, not a destination. These papers are written to keep us moving in it.

7. Questions for the Candlelight

1. Name one thing your side did that you would have condemned from the other side. What made it easier to accept?
2. Washington called party spirit “a fire not to be quenched” ✓ verified, Q05. What would “uniform vigilance” look like in your town or your feed?
3. Trust flips with the White House. What would an institution have to do to earn your trust no matter who runs it?
4. Madison wrote that “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” ✓ verified, Q11 Which of our rules only work if the people in charge are good? How would you redesign one?
5. Should a change to the rules of the game wait until after the next election to take effect? What would your side lose, and what would the country gain?
6. The Tolerance Continuum puts apathy, not hate, at the hinge. Where have you seen people know something was wrong and say nothing? Where have you?
7. What promise could you make tonight about how you will treat someone who votes differently than you?

Source notes

1. Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025” (2025-12-04). Via brief 22, “Trust in institutions and partisan division (2006-2026).”
2. Gallup, “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low” (2022-07-05); Gallup, “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Remains Near All-Time Low” (2026-07-13). Via brief 22.
3. Pew Research Center, “As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System” (2022-08-09). Via brief 22.
4. Gallup, “Record Party Gaps in Job Approval of Supreme Court, Congress” (2025-08-07). Via brief 22. Note: Pew and Gallup ask different questions (trust, confidence, job approval), so their figures are not directly comparable.
5. United States Capitol Police, “USCP Threat Assessment Cases for 2023” (2024-01-18) and “for 2025” (2026-01-27). Via brief 22.
6. U.S. Senate roll call votes of 2013-11-21, 2017-04-06, 2019-04-03, 2022-01-19 and 2025; Congressional Research Service reports R44819, R44773, RL31980 and R48729. Via brief 26, “Nominations and the filibuster.”
7. Clerk of the House roll calls 2019-695, 2019-696, 2021-17, 2024-43, 2025-175, 2025-322, 2026-298; U.S. Senate roll calls of 2020-02-05 and 2021-02-13; Senate Daily Press Gallery, 2024-04-17. Via brief 13, “Impeachments.”
8. Congressional Research Service, RL32717 and R48309; Senate and House roll calls of 2021-01-06 and 2021-01-07; U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., “48 Months Since the Jan. 6 Attack on U.S. Capitol” (archived copy of 2025-01-14); White House proclamation of 2025-01-20; Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, P.L. 117-328, Division P. Via brief 14, “Certification 2020 and January 6.”
9. Congressional Research Service, R42042 and IF12691; Federal Election Commission, 2023-2024 cycle statistical summary (2025-04-23) and Notice of Lack of Quorum (2026-04-06). Via brief 03, “Citizens United and campaign finance.”
10. Congressional Research Service and OMB records summarized in brief 06, “Government shutdowns.”
11. Civic Realism, “The Way Out: Grow the House, and Go Around the Gate,” civicrealism.com/the-fix.
12. The Trial of John Peter Zenger, 17 Howell’s State Trials 675 (1735), as cited in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) (Goldberg, J., concurring), which also gives the lawyer’s words quoted above (Q31). The libel law of the period: Blackstone, Commentaries, Book IV, ch. 11 (Q30). The Boston committee: Boston town records of 1772-11-02, as printed in The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. 2 (Cushing ed.) (Q32).

Founding-era and constitutional quotations are verified word for word against the Civic Realism founders corpus (passage ids in the table below). Spelling and capitalization follow the edition in the corpus, including Washington’s “dissention” and the Boston record’s “Sentiments.”

[S1-S7] Shawn Cosner, No-America (forthcoming; Reading Edition v1.2, unpublished manuscript, 2026). [D1-D4] Shawn Cosner, “A New Declaration of Independence” (December 2025, unpublished).

Quotation verification

How this was checked: every mark above was run through the Founders engine quote check (engine/quotecheck.py, check()) against the cited passage text on 2026-10-06, CPU only: 42 of 42 quotation instances passed (25 corpus marks, 7 No-America marks, 4 Declaration marks and the Pew wording from brief 22), 0 failed. My own quotations, from No-America and the Declaration, were checked the same way against the manuscript line and the Declaration paragraph cited.

Survey wording quoted in Part 1 (“just about always,” “most of the time”) is Pew’s question wording as given in brief 22, not a founders-corpus quotation. Discussion questions 2 and 4 repeat Q05 and Q11.

Dropped as unverifiable or not clean in the corpus: Washington’s “The name of American…” (verbatim only in an OCR printing, with a stray space and footnote marker in the keyed text); the full Federalist No. 10 definition sentence (the corpus Avalon text reads “adversed,” so the quotation stops before that word).